Been trying to figure out how to do this for quite awhile. Finally found a program that can handle it, but unfortunately it’s windows only and GUI based, so doing it for a batch is difficult. Anyway, here’s the problem this sets out to solve:

For language learning purposes or because you want to watch something with a friend who doesn’t read the same language as you you want to watch a movie with subtitles from two different languages playing at the same time. We’ll assume the subtitles you’re working with are in SRT format, if they’re not the situation is quite a bit more complicated, you can check the suggestions below.

[EXPAND Suggestions for subtitles in other formats]
Your best bet is simply to get them into SRT format. You can find a lot of subs at subscene or opensubtitles (or just google) and save yourself the trouble of converting. If that’s not an option, then you can simply convert your subs to SRT format. The program we’ll be using below, Aegissub can import a wide variety of subtitle files, with the exception of vobsub (.idx/.sub extension subtitles).

If you have that kind of subtitle you’ll need to do an OCR conversion, do some googling for avidemux and/or vobsub.
[/EXPAND]

If you’re running windows, then the easiest solution by far is just to use KMPlayer (as of this writing latest download link is here, if it’s changed just browse the forum a bit). In KMPlayer you can open the file, then choose a 1st and 2nd language subtitle from within the right click menu.

If you’re not on windows then you’ll need to proceed with the merge and convert process. In order to merge the subtitles together you’ll first need to download Aegisub (it’s cross platform). Within Aegisub open the first language’s subtitle file, hit Cmd-A (or Ctrl-A on windows) and then Edit->Copy Lines. Open the second language’s file, and paste the contents in. Then do File->Export Subtitles and save to a new file. If you re-open that new file you’ll see that subs have been merged together. So just rename the new file to match your subtitle file and you’re good to go.

4 thoughts on “Watching movies in two languages: Merging two separate srt files (one for each language) into one single SRT file”

Thanks as well. Your instructions for Aegisub were clear and they worked for me. However, how to do make each languages’ subtitle different? For instance I have one set in English, which I want to stay in white, and the other set is Spanish,but I want those to all be in yellow. It make the subtitles a lot easier to read. For the life of me I can figure out how to do that in Aegisub.